3 Articles tagged “Batch”

A previous article in the PostgreSQL Concurrency series covered how to manage concurrent retweets in an efficient way: in Computing and Caching, we learnt how to maintain a cache right in your PostgreSQL database, using MATERIALIZED VIEWS. We also had a look at how to take care of Batch Updates and Concurrency.

While in the first case we are providing a solution to a technical problem where we want to solve performance issues while keeping the same semantics, in the second case we are actually implementing a part of the application’s Business Logic as a scheduled job.

Today’s article shows a modern technique to handle the scheduling of those business oriented activities that are not tied to any user activity. When thinking about it this way, you certainly don’t want to implement the backbone of your business logic in a shell script that’s directly maintained in the production environment, do you?

This article fits in the PostgreSQL Concurrency series, where we installed a tweeter like application schema and had all the characters from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream tweet their own lines in our database in PostgreSQL Concurrency: Data Modification Language.

A previous article in the series covered how to manage concurrent retweets in an efficient way: Computing and Caching, where we learn how to maintain a cache right in your PostgreSQL database, thanks for materialized views. We even went as far as maintaining an external cache in another application layer using PostgreSQL LISTEN and NOTIFY features and a Golang application.

Today’s article is going to address concurrency in the context of updating data in a batch. This activity is quite common, as soon as your system is connected to other systems either internally or with external providers. While it’s pretty easy to ingest new data, and easy enough to update data from an external source when nothing happens in your database, doing the operation safely with concurrent activity is more complex. Once more though, PostgreSQL comes with all the tooling you need to handle that situation.

Performance consulting involves some tricks that you have to teach over and over again. One of them is that SQL tends to be so much better at dealing with plenty of rows in a single statement when compared to running as many statements, each one against a single row.